So I’m quite new to the self hosting world, and not the most tech savvy, but I’m looking for a way to expand and increase the reliability of my file storage. I used to just use cloud storage but got concerned about privacy and environmental impact and whittled down all of my data to about 200GB including all my music, photos, movies, backup files, etc. I have a laptop, phone, and mp3 player and currently use synching to sync all of my files across all three devices. This works great, I love how seamless, cheap, and automatic everything is. But I want to expand my storage abilities and include a backup that isn’t with me / in my apartment. I was thinking of getting a couple raspberry pis with m.2 ssds, one to leave at my sisters house (small and unobtrusive little plastic box connected to power and her wifi) and then one at my apartment to act as another node, freeing up space on my phone so that all my files are in at least 3 different devices (3:2:1 rule?). this feels like an fairly easy project to set up, but I have a feeling there is probably a better way to go about what I’m trying to achieve.
Hmm. An interesting point and a good consideration - maybe a reason not to make this recommendation to others. In my own case I’m not concerned.
I’m using 1tb SSDs. They’re pretty cheap now. I don’t think they suffer from any of the problems you’ve described?
I couldn’t find any information about longevity offline vs online. In daily use SSDs do seem to be more reliable than HDDs, particularly as they get older.
The other thing is my strategy is something like 4-3-2, so the offline is an additional final hail mary. The chances that I would require it and it would have failed in the month or so since I updated it are infinitessimal.
Finally there are practical considerations. My offline copy resides in a physical safe in our house, and is unencrypted. If I were to die suddenly, this would be the most accessible copy of important documents, family photos, et cetera.
It’s not a perfect system but it’s “pretty good” and I’m hoping I don’t die suddenly so there’s that LOL.